A Thomistic Approach to Implicit Bias

Abstract: This essay examines how Aquinas’s philosophical psychology can suggest a way of analyzing the phenomenon of implicit bias. On the account sketched here, implicit bias should be understood, not as a submerged or unconscious belief, but as a pre-rational imaginative frame that may or may not accord with our intellectual beliefs. Such imaginative frames are common features of our experience, and they arise from a habituation of the cogitative power in tandem with imagination and memory. The essay explains how this notion works in Aquinas’s philosophical psychology, how it can be applied to provide an account of implicit bias, and why (given Aquinas’s account of justice) we are morally obligated to remediate our implicit biases wherever possible. The final sections offer a Thomistic response to the objection that “sometimes the stereotype is true,” and return to Aquinas’s philosophical psychology to identify some strategies for remediating implicit biases.